Mobile Home Toting experince....?

A lot of wreckers and smaller tow outfits around here are always dragging around those portable construction offices. They're pretty long and wide and seem pretty unstable going down the road. I try to give those buggers all the room i can. Havent seen much mobile home transport around here though..

 

dont know if its unusual or not but i used to run 8 trucks doing mobiles and modulars, ran as far out as wyoming, colorado, utah and idaho.

its like and od load we pulled em 16 wide and as long as 84 feet. so i guess od loads would compare only ya dont have to chain em down, just put on the lights signs, hook the electric brakes, let out the extendale mirrors and ride.

oddly enough, the best drivers for placing them on sites are guys that have never driven a truck before. you have to depend on a guide man on the ground and just look at him, and not look in your mirrors. that is a hard hard hard habit to break.

i have had to tape trash bags over the mirrors to back some guys into a site or sales lot.

 

I'd say it compares to bedbugging but more scary. Some of the places they put those things are insane, literally. Ive put a moving trailer in some absolutely nightmarish places but putting a trailer in would scare the crap out of me

 

lol, not comparable to bed bugging. we dont handle the furniture,lol.

you have to be ready to timber up supports across ditches , put em on rollers to slide em sideways, etc , or hook to dozers or a housecat mover.

but hauling from factories you dont get into that only if you set em up or crane lift the modulars onto foundations.

 

Like i said skate .. you guys are nuts

 

I miss the good old days running FL blanket permits Fleetwood on the back no escort and hauling ### once a shanty shaker allways a shanty shaker

 

interesting idea! I will have to remember the plastic bag idea for those blade haulers who try to use their mirrors when backing up.

 

You must be from the midwest. We (west coast) see guys come from the midwest or east coast that just dont understand. We pick the house up at the factory, deliver it to the homesite and get it done because in most places we go to , dumping a house on a dealers lot is not an option. We have to carry crawlers on our trucks, a jade on the pilot truck, and dunnage on the other pilot truck. Bennett came here 15 years ago and ruined our gig by telling dealers they would haul houses for fuel money while their drivers live in their 1977 freightliner cabovers. Guess what, they couldnt hang. We sometimes have half a million dollars worth of equipment roll out of the factory with a house, we get stuff done!

The good ole' days of buying a new crawler every 18 months are over for me but if any of you want to try hauling houses out here I'll give you a list of what you need. Bare minimum to get started.

2008 or newer truck (CARB compliant because most of the good paying houses go to CA).
A steel track CSI or Layton (you can find an abused used one for $30K or new for $60K). I paid $75K for mine but I put 20K winches, custom paint and long stingers on them (not mandatory).
A stretch lowboy if you want to do Mods (too competitive for me).
A rubber tracked crawler for mobile home parks, (you can use steel tracks with rubber mats on the ground but thats hillbilly).
A Jade, if you dont know what it is you shouldnt be operating one (you'll break a house in half).
A Trans lift, sometimes a Jade is too big or you cant get it out of the spot after the house is there.
At least a 3 roller Perfectaline system for old fashioned manual labor when all else fails.
Winches on your truck, pilot vehicles, and crawlers... (I recommend 20K hydro winches because an 8 axle house buried to the frame rails in sand isnt coming out with an electric winch).
$250,000 gets your foot in the door.
Or, you could go buy on old beater, weld a hitch ball on the back and get $4 a loaded mile like Bennett does. Yep, thats $2 a mile total and you cant travel in wind, at night, in snow, rush hour in most cities (curfew). You get to stop every few hours to spend 30 minutes fixing plastic or changing tires.

I never operated my trucks for less than $6 a mile and made more money off the asphalt than I did rolling down the road.

10% of us make 90% of the money because we are willing and able to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this job. Im third generation and well connected in the industry. I went broke in 2010, Im rebuilding now and its tough. I have a rolodex with thousands of names in it and I cant get enough money or work to buy fuel on a load for now. Other transporters call me to see if I have any work for them. Bottom line is this. Be ready to be stressed, broke, and divorced. Look around at old mobile home guys, they're all broke. You can make (literally) a million dollars one year then lose more than that the next year. Its tough on a marriage.

 

i'm talking way before your time it sounds like, When there where no such things as crawlers and 6 way hitches and even portable screw guns. Trucks where 15 ft and 10 ft suicide. when you had to use bottle jacks to spin a house around, and if you where lucky enough to have a up and down hydraulic system you where the bomb. but we still got it done and i was with morgan drive away for about 10 years. hauled them all 48 new and secondaries now a days you young pumps have it easy but there is nothing wrong with using tools to make it easier on you, i've used crawlers, 6 ways, done crane sets had to even helicopter one in before it can be a cool job. business a'nt what it used to be, just remembering the old days when the money was a lot better.